The top Pentagon technology official said Wednesday the Trump administration shouldn’t seek to nationalize or take partial government stakes in artificial intelligence companies.
“I hope not,” Emil Michael, Department of Defense chief technology officer, told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” when asked about that prospect of partial government ownership, which has emerged amid growing concerns about rapid AI advancement.
Despite its frequent warnings about the dangers of big government socialism, President Donald Trump’s second administration has taken stakes in a growing portfolio of private sector companies, including a 10% stake in Intel and a “golden share” in U.S. Steel, now a subsidiary of Nippon Steel.
But when it comes to AI, Michael told CNBC, “We don’t want government to get in the middle.”
“That doesn’t really go well in terms of nationalization,” he said, noting that U.S. AI leaders are among the “biggest companies in the history of the world.”
Michael also repeatedly signaled opposition to ramping up government regulatory oversight of those companies, even as AI leaders such as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have warned the industry should slow its fast-improving models to mitigate risks.
“This is the sort of tension you get between people who want to pre-regulate like Europe, and those who want to hold companies responsible for good products being developed that are aligned and safe, not releasing them until they have those dimensions in them,” he said.
Michael acknowledged that the recent example of the AI hack of Hugging Face is “concerning,” but added, “I don’t know what kind of regulation would stop that from happening.”
At the same time, he said it would be “dangerous” to place all trust in the hands of a few AI chiefs.
“I think we’re going to make sure that all the laws are enforced,” Michael said, noting there are already “a ton of laws on the book from the Federal Trade Commission.”
Trump, whose administration strongly supports the rapid growth of AI and data centers in an effort to box out China, has angrily pushed back on the calls for an AI slowdown or greater regulation.
The president accused those raising alarms of pushing a “hoax” and a “scam.”
Michael agreed with Trump and other administration officials that there is a “coordinated campaign to scare people to make irrational decisions that benefit some of these incumbents” in AI.
Michael suggested that those developing new tech could voluntarily “just stop some of these things until they figure it out.”
“The promoters of some of these extinction, death-cult-like philosophies are part of that effort,” he said.
Correction: Top Pentagon technology official Emil Michael told CNBC he hopes the Trump administration won’t seek to nationalize or take government stakes in artificial intelligence companies. The nature of those companies was misstated in a headline on an earlier version of this article.